Sally Hemings has long captured international attention as the enslaved mistress of Thomas Jefferson. That Hemings was also a mother to Jefferson’s mixed-race children, the half-sister of Jefferson’s wife, and, for a time, the most famous enslaved person in early nineteenth-century America, all seems to have escaped any serious consideration. In The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family Annette Gordon-Reed delves more deeply into the historical record, employing many unpublished primary sources, to bring to light the Hemings family in all its complexity. Known only to the public as the slaves of Thomas Jefferson, Gordon-Reed has recovered the Hemings’ full story to cast them in a new and more accurate light: as a quintessentially American family.

Winner of the 2009 National Humanities Medal, the 2009 Pulitzer Prize, and the 2008 National Book Award, Annette Gordon-Reed is a professor of law at New York Law School and a professor of history at Rutgers University. Along with numerous articles and essays, she is the author of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy. Gordon-Reed is a graduate of Dartmouth College and Harvard Law School. She lives in New York City with her husband and children.

Come support the 6th graders of Cambridge School as they launch their participation in Greg Mortenson's (author of Three Cups of Tea) 'Pennies a Page' effort to build schools in Central Asia. To donate, call or stop by the Northshire Bookstore. For more information about the read-a-thon, please contact: Therese Zoufaly at Therese.Zoufaly@cambridgecsd.org.

This day long event will conclude with a reading at 3pm by Vermont Childrens picture book author, Stephen Swinburne, presenting three of his new books: Whose Shoes?, for children grades K - 2nd that explores various occupations through a simple, lively text and bright, colorful photographs; Wiff and Dirty George: The Z.E.B.R.A. Incident, Swinburne's first middle-grade novel; and Ocean Soup, a book of tide pool poems.

Set in contemporary New England, Chris Bohjalian’s latest novel unfolds a story of the intricate consequences of domestic violence. Secrets of Eden opens as Alice Hayward’s life ends—but her story begins. Weaving together compelling narratives, Bohjalian examines the inner complexities that mark all of our lives. This haunting literary thriller is a riveting page-turner in which nothing is precisely what it seems.

Chris Bohjalian is the author of twelve novels, including the New York Times bestsellers, Skeletons at the Feast, The Double Bind, Before You Know Kindness, The Law of Similars, and Midwives. Bohjalian won the New England Book Award in 2002, and his novel, Midwives, was an Oprah’s Book Club selection, a Publishers Weekly "Best Book," and a New England Booksellers Association Discovery pick. He has written for a wide variety of magazines, including Cosmopolitan, Reader's Digest, and the Boston Globe Sunday Magazine, and has been a Sunday columnist for Gannett's Burlington Free Press since 1992. Bohjalian graduated from Amherst College, and lives in Vermont with his wife and daughter.